EXCLUSIVE: BBC Studios is developing U.S. versions of sleeper hit family comedy Here We Go and time travel series Mammoth, with Universal Television and Amy Poehler‘s Paper Kite attached to the former and Fox to the latter.
BBC Studios has five developments with American platforms and streamers in place, productions boss Zai Bennett revealed to Deadline, as the team looks to unearth the next Ghosts, a British show that was remade for CBS to acclaim.
Here We Go is being penned by Emmy-winning The Good Place writer Matt Murray with Poehler exec producing for Paper Kite. Created by Tom Basden and starring Katherine Parkinson, Alison Steadman and Jim Howick, it was recently recommissioned for a fourth season. Set in the town of Bedford, it follows the dysfunctional and eccentric trials of the Jessop family. It first emerged in Covid-19 under the working title Pandemonium and takes a shaky camera approach to filming, which could work well in the States.
The news comes several months after the nascent BBC Studios Fiction label struck a first-look deal with Basden, which runs until May 2027.
Watch on Deadline
Meanwhile, Mammoth, which recently launched Season 2 on the BBC, stars and is created by Welsh comic and actor Mike Bubbins. The well-received show follows a Welsh PE teacher who is trapped by an avalanche in the late 1970s on a ski trip and wakes up on New Year’s Day 2024. After his initial period of fame ends, Mammoth – technically a man in his nineties, but with a body of a man in his forties – returns to his job at school. Fox Entertainment Studios is co-producing the U.S. version with BBC Studios. Creative team has not yet been set.
Along with versions of This Country and Miranda, Ghosts emerged from a successful BBC Studios partnership with Lionsgate, which elapsed two years back.
BBC Studios productions boss Zai Bennett said Ghosts provides a blueprint for what can be done with American comedy and “it would be nice to have some of those where we are the lead studio.” “You want to own the economics,” he added.
Our full interview with Bennett can be read here.